'My Back Yard' (1943) is the Cincinnati Art Museum's first acquisition of a painting by renowned 20th-century artist Georgia O'Keeffe. / The Enquirer/Carrie Cochran

Dr. Julie Aronson, Curator of American Painting, Sculpture and Drawings, is photographed with the museum's newest acquisition, Georgia O'Keefe's 'My Back Yard' (1943) at the Cincinnati Art Museum. / The Enquirer/Carrie Cochran

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Suspense, tension, heart-stopping timing and finally jubilation – not emotions usually associated with putting art on the walls of Cincinnati Art Museum.

But for curator Julie Aronson, who in May won a bid for a stunning landscape painting by American artist Georgia O’Keeffe, the auction with Christie’s in New York was exciting but harrowing.

“There are whole strategies for bidding at auction. You wait for things to slow down, because you don’t want to end up paying more for something than you need to,” said Aronson, curator of American painting, sculpture and drawings.

O’Keeffe (1887-1986) painted “My Back Yard,” an oil on canvas, in 1943, about three years after purchasing her Ghost Ranch house in Abiquiu. There, the New Mexican desert, with its richly colored land formations and vast blue skies, inspired some of her finest landscapes.

O’Keeffe’s landscapes are stunning because of “how lyrical they are,” Aronson said. “There’s a real beauty in the way she handles transitions. The New Mexico landscape gave the artist a field for exploring abstraction.

“There’s also this feeling you get that she was so connected to the subject she was painting. In this one, she even titles it ‘My Back Yard,’ emphasizing that personal aspect of it. This is something that means a lot to her.”

The museum paid more than $1.8 million for its first O’Keeffe. It will go on exhibit in time for Labor Day Weekend, in a small, second-floor gallery.

Aronson learned of the offer three weeks before the auction, as she perused Christie’s catalog.

The museum had been looking for an O’Keeffe for nearly two decades, since 1995, through the tenures of three museum directors.

“We knew this was an important hole in the collection, and I’ve been here 14 years. It’s always been on the list of what we thought we needed to be acquiring,” Aronson said.

From the brief catalog description, she didn’t know if “My Back Yard” was the right O’Keeffe. It is not a large painting – just 18-by-24 inches. Did it have enough “wall power” to hold its own?

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She had other questions, too: Was it museum quality? Would it fit into the collection? Would the museum have enough money to buy it?

“My challenge all the time is, what can we get within our resources that can match the quality of a great collection of American paintings?” Aronson said.

Like any art museum, there is protocol when it comes to purchasing a new work of art. A subcommittee of the board of trustees oversees all acquisitions, from gifts to large purchases. An opportunity of this value may come up only once in a decade. For this purchase, the museum drew from six funds designated specifically for acquisitions.

Before making her pitch to the committee, Aronson had to do research. She received a condition report from the auction house. Museum Director Aaron Betsky and curator of European paintings Esther Bell, who had already planned a trip to New York, arranged to see the painting, and deemed it worthy. A conservator was hired to assess its condition.

Aronson had to defend the painting before the committee, and state why it would serve the community. She had to defend the price by finding recent comparable prices.

“The auction estimate was within the realm of reason, but then she had to argue for the top price they would be able to comfortably go,” said Anita Ellis, the museum’s deputy director for collections.

The bidding on that day in May had slowed to a crawl. Aronson was bidding by phone to a representative at Christie’s while simultaneously following the auction streaming live on her laptop. Everyone in the museum’s new offices in the renovated Art Academy building could see her in the phone booth through glass walls. Betsky, who was traveling, was following the auction on his iPad. New items were coming up for bid every 30 seconds. Five minutes before the O’Keeffe was offered, Aronson received a call.

“You have to wait for them to call you, which is unnerving,” she said. “I was bidding against two other phone bidders. The floor (bidders) had dropped out. We had one more bid left that was authorized.”

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All of this was happening quickly. Then, the auctioneer started the hammer bid: “Going once, going twice ...” Did she want to bid higher? Aronson knew her authorized limit, and she had not yet reached it. Her last competitor had dropped out.

“The entire office was streaming it. They saw the hammer bid and they knew it was ours. I heard this big roar – we got it!” Ellis said.

About an hour after the hammer dropped, the invoice arrived in Aronson’s email inbox. A month later, the painting arrived in Cincinnati.

Even then, she had to wait to see it. “You must wait 24 hours to acclimate the painting before opening it,” she said. When she finally opened it June 23, she was surprised at how delicate the colors were.

“The colors are much subtler than any of the reproductions I had seen,” she said.

Another surprise was what was underneath the arts-and-crafts-style frame. Aronson believes it to be the original frame, as O’Keeffe had intended it – a narrow brass strip typical of the artist’s framing style.

Originally, O’Keeffe had given it to her sister, Claudia. Aronson wants to learn more about their relationship.

In its inaugural exhibition, Aronson is hanging related pieces, including a photograph of the artist and a 1930 painting by Italian-born American artist Luigi Lucioni, featuring Native American artifacts.

Eventually, Aronson would like the museum to own one of O’Keeffe’s flower paintings. For now, she can’t wait to see “My Back Yard” on display. “Because we’ve been looking for it for such a long time, it’s a gratifying thing.”

Aronson, a recognized authority on the sculpture of Bessie Potter Vonnoh, the subject of her doctoral dissertation at the University of Delaware, has a special interest in the work of American women artists. This year, she was also instrumental in acquiring a painting, “The First Communion,” by Cincinnati-born Elizabeth Nourse. It will go on exhibit this fall.

“That’s an area I enjoy working on, and it’s nice to me that I’ve been able to make these two major acquisitions of women artists this year. I still think they are somewhat underrepresented.”

About Georgia O'Keeffe

Georgia O’Keeffe is one of the most important artists of the 20th century. She played a key role in the American Modernism movement.

Her life’s journey took her from Wisconsin to Chicago (she studied at the Art Institute of Chicago) to New York. She was teaching and traveling for a time before a friend sent her paintings to photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz. She married Stieglitz and settled into the New York art scene but eventually found that New Mexico felt more like home.

O’Keeffe died in 1986 at age 98. She created more than 2,000 works of art in her lifetime, many of them representations of the New Mexico landscape.

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Her paintings, drawings and sculptures can be found in museums and in private collections worldwide. The Art Institute of Chicago currently has 15 of her works on display.

“My Back Yard” (1943) was inspired by O’Keeffe’s view from her home at Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu, N.M. O’Keeffe had two homes in Abiquiu, both now open to visitors. The O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe has more than 1,000 of her pieces.

“Georgia O'Keeffe breathed both a sensuality and a monumentality into landscapes, bodies, and flowers,” Aaron Betsky says. “She painted with immense skill and consummate abandon. The Cincinnati Art Museum has long wanted to have one of her works in our collection. Her approach to abstracting real things while making pure fields of color or shapes seem tangible are unmatched in modern American painting.” ⬛

Here’s what Christie’s auction notes say about the Cincinnati Art Museum’s new painting: “As is true of Georgia O’Keeffe’s finest works, the strength of ‘My Back Yard’ lies in its careful balance of realism and abstraction, its intricate layering of objective and subjective meaning and its wonderful synthesis of form and color.”

When you can see it

Georgia O’Keeffe’s “My Back Yard” will be on public display beginning Aug. 31 in Gallery 212.